Nook sales crashed by over 66 percent during 2013 holiday season

Back in August 2013, Barnes & Noble declared that it wasn’t giving up on its Nook e-reader just yet. Despite its struggles, the longstanding American book retailer blamed previous management for poor sales. It turns out, though, that even with a new president and CEO, few people want to buy the things.

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On Thursday, Barnes & Noble announced that “device and accessories sales” plummeted to $88.7 million during the October through December 2013 holiday period, a drop of 66.7 percent. The company attributed the drop to “lower unit selling volume and lower average selling prices.” Of course, that’s prime shopping season, when most retailers see a spike in sales. The company added that “digital content sales” were $36.5 million during the same time frame, a drop of 27.3 percent.

Somehow, CEO Michael Huseby thought that these depressed sales figures are a good thing.

"We are pleased with our holiday sales results, especially our core comparable bookstore sales, which were essentially flat and an improvement as compared to the first half of the year," he said in a statement. “During the holiday period we benefitted from a strong lineup of bestselling titles, great execution by our booksellers and merchants, an effective advertising campaign, and strong increases in our Juvenile, Gift, and Toys & Games categories.”

“Sales in the Nook segment declined year-over-year largely because during the previous holiday season the company introduced two new tablet products, while no new tablets were introduced this year,” he continued.

121 Reader Comments

Between a Nook and Calibre, you should never need to touch B&N for basically anything, if you don't want to. (I'd buy more books from B&N if I knew which of theirs didn't have DRM - I consider 'buying' something with DRM to be renting, and I don't rent books.)

With Calibre you can easily strip the DRM from your Nook purchases and archive them so there is no downside to purchasing them from B&N.

I wouldn't really say it is easy. I still haven't set up any ebook DRM stripping cause it is kind of a pain in the ass.

You install CalibreYou add the deDRM pluginsOne time hassle and it's done. Of course since you have not actually installed it, using it is a real hassle.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way on Linux. Looks like it has gotten easier than the last time I looked, but still stupid.

I went on the Nook store and randomly picked three books I knew of (a George RR Martin one, a Neil Gaiman one, and I forget what the third was). I was shocked by the price disparity. In each case, the Kindle book was substantially cheaper than the Nook book. Prices ranged from 40% to 85% of the Nook book.

B&N got where it was in the brick-and-mortar wars in part through aggressive pricing. They know how to play this game. If they're substantially more expensive than Amazon, they're gonna lose.